HALIFAX – John Klymko thinks butterflies are the key to our future.
The zoologist at the Atlantic Canada Conservation Data Centre is also director of the Butterfly Atlas, a Maritimes-wide project where groups of volunteers have been documenting butterflies over the last few years.
The project will soon be in its fifth and final year.
“Butterflies are very important to the Maritimes environment,” said Klymko. “They’re important pollinators. They’re important food sources. They occur in a wide variety of habitats.”
“They can act as a barometer for the health of those habitats, for the health of the environment. By assessing the health of their population, we can get an idea of the overall health of the Maritimes environment.”
So far, 17,000 butterflies have been documented in the Butterfly Atlas.
“Think of it as a canary in a coal mine situation. We start to see issues with some of our butterflies. It may warrant further investigation to see just what’s going on in their environment that might be causing that decline,” he said.
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The project has received funding from Environment Canada, the Gosling Foundation and the New Brunswick government over the years.
However, Klymko said that there has never been a sole source of funding to support the atlas.
It now needs at least $25,000 to finish its final year.
“That helps cover administrative costs for keeping the atlas going, coordinating volunteers, doing presentations to naturalist clubs throughout the Maritimes,” Klymko said.
The director is now turning to the Aviva Community Fund in hopes the vote-based, online competition will help the project win additional funding.
The funds would mean a lot to volunteer Jim Edsall, who devotes much of his free time cataloguing butterflies.
“I think it would be great. It would give us a chance to really finish the project properly. There are still large areas of the Maritimes that haven’t been covered,” he said.
Edsall has been recreationally studying butterflies ever since he was a child.
Though he understands that butterflies may not be important to the average person, he said that they provide critical baseline data for researchers.
“All natural things have a place in our lives whether we know it or not,” he said.
“It gives us an idea of the state of health of our environment and it will give us a chance to, say 10 to 15 years down the road, to look back and see how things have changed.”
The Nova Scotia Nature Trust is just one of the many organizations who use the data collected by the Butterfly Atlas.
Conservation Coordinator Katie Porter said that it’s important to sustain the project.
“It helps us understand the distribution of species, where they fit in the conservation scheme and that helps us to prioritize the selection of sites for conservation,” she said.
Voting on the Maritimes Butterfly Atlas project on the Aviva Community Fund website ends November 25.
If the Butterfly Atlas does not get enough votes to advance to the next round, Klymko said that the organization will pursue other avenues for funding.
He said that a book or web database will likely be published next year when the project is complete.
There is hope that the project will be repeated so scientists can compare short- and long-term environmental trends in the Maritimes.
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